Music Streaming Services vs. Music Ownership

Can music streaming services replace music ownership?

This is one of the never ending questions I hear pertaining to the music industry. Because we are in a transitional state from physical retail album sales to digital distribution and online music streaming, answers to questions like this have the potential to reshape to how artists, record labels, and music streaming sites conduct business.

In the article “Social Media Networks Are Music’s Curse and Salvation” on wired.com by Eliot Van Buskirk, he talks about the different social media sites and how they’re redefining the music industry’s way of business and the different adoption methods that have been utilized. For example:

•    Myspace, Imeem and iLike music players allow users to buy an artists tracks directly from online retailers like iTunes.
•    Youtube videos have online music store purchase links attached for advertisers.

On of the main points of argument in this discussion is whether people will continue to own music or just stream it utilizing sites such as Pandora, Imeem, or other music streaming playlist platforms. There’s no doubt that the Internet has made listening to music more accessible to users, allowing people to get what they want, when they want. As a result, it is eliminating the need to own music as it’s available everywhere on the Internet for free. This could possibly allow for sites like Pandora to now charge (but maybe at their own peril) a monthly fee for people to create endless customized playlists, giving a percentage of profits to artists/record labels for licensing/publishing.

Personally, even though there is a natural human desire to have control of ownership, I think the need to completely own all of a users music will become obsolete and a subscription service for the deep tracks will suffice the need to own as the world becomes more relied on the Internet (at least on the legal music side). After all, you can’t hang a MP3 from your dorm room wall.

With music becoming more and more portable, feeding not only our headphones but our cars and homes, there is a need to provide users with an endless catalog of chosen music that can be shared universally. Although this opinion is technology reliant, it’s still something that is very much a possibility since high-end products (cars, phones, etc.) already have the Internet as a feature and this technology exists in many forms already online. What is left is for the record labels to accept this change of product interaction and adapt to the current methods of user consumption.

We don’t yet know where the music industry will end up, but seeing these patterns and the popularity of social media sites for music listeners, give us an idea of where it’s going.